Brave_New_World

Siler Head English AP 12 Mrs. Musgrove 20/8/09 Brave New World Brave New World is a bold novel that was ahead of its time for many reasons. The story takes place in a futuristic, utopian society. A world where everything is controlled, individuality is a freakish occurrence, and grief and pain are nonexistent. All imperfection has been eradicated. There is no class struggle, no need to better themselves, and there is no motivation to take a step out of the ordinary. It is essentially author Aldous Huxley’s vision of the distant future. While nothing Huxley prophesized in the novel actually materialized, yet, some of his predictions feel eerily similar to modern society. The England Huxley created in Brave New World is incredibly technologically advanced. Helicopters have replaced the standard automobile as means of transportation. Movies are now “feelies”, interactive films that stimulate the viewer’s senses. And perhaps the most bizarre of all is the extinction of parenting. Humans are now created and incubated in “hatcheries” spread out across the globe. As they sleep, the children are brainwashed with radio messages, which change as they age. The concept of a “mother” or “father” is considered outlandish and barbaric in this world, to the point of taboo. Even mention of such a notion is heavily frowned upon. Another disturbing facet of the novel is the savage reservation, a tourist attraction of sorts. The reservation is a facility located in New Mexico where children are actually born from the womb. The people are referred to as savages and live primitively, primitive meaning their society interacts similarly to today’s world. These people feel pain. They have an ancestry. They age and hurt. They suffer because of their emotions, the exact opposite of “society”. The savages are also in a sense, prisoners, seeing as how a deadly fence encloses the area. As the reservation warden so kindly pointed out, “Those who are born in the reservation are destined to die there. As far fetched as some parts of Brave New World might seem, others hit closer to home than one might have thought. The theory of “everybody belongs to everybody” is a major recurrence in the novel. Since marriage is unheard of, men and women go from partner to partner constantly, it is after all what they were raised to do. The hippie movement in the late sixties and early seventies also entailed this belief, calling it “free love”, astonishingly similar to Huxley’s ideas. Before and during the hippie movement, the civil rights movement was also in action, fighting for the end of segregation between blacks and whites. At the end of the novel, Mr. Savage, a savage brought from the reservation back to the England society, is swarmed by media and unwanted spectators, “like an ape at a zoo”. After pleading with them to leave him be, they only answer by bringing more and more people, eventually driving the savage to suicide. This is almost a mirror of how media and paparazzi behave today; invading the privacy of celebrities, spreading rumors, taking pictures. Some stars cannot handle the hysteria and are forced to see therapists in order to cope with all the unwanted attention.